Mental Health for Dummies

or

How Psychiatry is Destructive only when used as directed (more poems)

"Interventions" says the official
Souls
The Children are Teaching Each Other
Your Brain And YOU
A Far More Modest Proposal
PSYCHU (Gesundheit!)
Run, You Sucker, Run!
On Hearing Voices
If We Outlaw Dreams, Only Outlaws Will Have Dreams
Alcohol, drugs--people trying to open up
What happened to education?
The "science" of psychiatry
Psych-iatry: healing the spirit
The race is ON!
Strapped in the asylum beds
"You should see a psychiatrist."
Dreams and Nightmares
DSM-IV
We Don't Need the Help of Terrorists to Destroy America

"Interventions" says the official,

talking about schools and violence —
we must have the appropriate interventions,
even well before school age.
This is my worst dream: A child,
for example, a two-year-old, is...

is a child, say the word, a
child, a child, a child...

and in my dream, a child
is alone, perhaps on a lawn
with blown dandelions under whispering leaves
under summer cloud mountains, perhaps
alone in a room playing with something
on the white-flower-patterned
blue carpet, and the child is
happy or sad or both in rapid
succession, but certainly alive,
changing, creating, being a child, a child...

when the room or the sun darkens,
and huge over the shrinking child I see

an intervention, intervention,
intervention — oh what will happen
to the child? It's an intervention

[TOP]

Souls

Remember how the slave masters and slave traders
justified slavery? They said that black people
didn't have souls. They could see (couldn't they?)
that black people laughed, cried, sang, danced,
reasoned, talked -- but none of that mattered —
they couldn't see the souls there. We lose
the ability to see the souls of those
we think we have harmed. It's easier
to harm others if we imagine
there is no one there. That's why
psychology became so prominent: It said
that there's no soul (or psyche) to study,
that psychology was simply the study
of animal behavior — this in a Germany
where Bismark's government craved cannon fodder,
so gladly embraced and funded this animal study.
Later Stalin financed Pavlov hoping to learn
to turn us on and off like dogspit.
And now the National Institute of Mental Health
wants to screen pre-school inner city kids
(jungle monkeys, said a recent NIMH head)
to detect potential for violence and "treat" it.

The odd thing is, that those who can't see
souls — can't see that anyone is there —
soon cease to be souls themselves.
They cease to be aware of themselves
as immortal spiritual beings. That blaze of awareness
shrinks to a cold hard cinder. They become
the emptiness they mirror in others.
These days the word "soul" often means
something only black people have.
Black people who think that
are in danger of going blind
the way white people did,
but it's hard to blame them,
since so many white people have made themselves
so tiny and dark and hard to see.

Fortunately, the psychiatrists
will soon be supplying soul
in tablet form. The absence of soul
(and perhaps the presence too)
is simply a chemical imbalance of the brain.

Or perhaps psychiatrists can't see us.
Are we any better? Look about you. Is anybody home?
Can you see me?
Can you see each other?

[TOP]

The Children are Teaching Each Other
[excerpted from a longer poem, "Kill The Children"]

The children are shooting each other.
Counsel them, test them as infants, ferret out
their violent impulses, treat them, fix them.

The children are shooting each other.
Melt the guns, shatter the TV screens, illegalize
violent video games and the evening news, remake
Bambi to make the hunters spare Bambi's Mom...

The children are shooting each other.
Don't melt the guns, but ARM yourself with
automatic weapons, dig moats around your houses,
bar your windows, hide your own children (steal
their guns).

The children are shooting each other.
Talk to them about marijuana (but not about Ritalin
or Prozac), hug them, spend quality time with them,
teach them to duck.

The children are shooting each other.
Tattoo the 10 Commandments on their foreheads (but
don't teach them to read or to face one another)
and teach them to duck.

The children are shooting each other —
It's good for them:
Outcome-based, relevent, experiential education!
Death education! Venting of hostility, expressing
self-generated values, creative long-term planning,
refusing to sacrifice self-esteem to socially-
imposed hierarchical authoritarian parental values.

The children are shooting each other.
Teach them, instead, to shoot the shrinks and
teach them to aim.

The children are shooting each other.
We hoped to prevent children by passing out condoms
in the schools, but this is more proactive.

The children are shooting each other.
It serves them right! Now they'll keep still!

The children are shooting each other.
No, wait, can't we all just get along?

The children are shooting each other.
Teach them to aim.

[TOP]

Your Brain And YOU

Your brain is your best friend.
Take good care of your brain
and your brain will take care of you.
Just follow these few simple rules:

1. ALWAYS clean your brain after use.
Don't forget to brush between the folds
to avoid mental plaque.

2. NEVER take drugs or too much alcohol.
These dry up the brain and destroy
its spongy resilience. To understand
the importance of this, imagine
falling on your head: The healthy brain
is a bouncy pudding that absorbs
most of the shock, sparing your delicate
spinal cord waves of whiplashing distress.
When you abuse your brain, it dries up
just like this withered mushroom and makes
a lousy shock absorber. If your brain
is already dried up from abuse, be sure
to drink lots of water.

3. ALWAYS keep your brain well-fed.
Just as your muscles need protein,
your brain needs its proper food
to maintain its chemical balance.
For example, if your teachers
don't know what to do with you,
that's a sign that your brain
suffers from a shortage of Ritalin.
If you're feeling depressed, that's Mr. Brain
telling you he's hungry for his Prozac.
Just as you find food for your stomach
at the grocers, you find food for your brain
at the shrinks. Shrinks are called shrinks
because shrink food, like all drugs,
dries up the brain, which brings us
to the next rule:

4. NEVER fall on your head after
feeding your brain. And finally,

5. DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT. After all, you ARE
your brain, so why should you worry about a mass
of grey puddingy stuff just to keep a mass of grey
puddingy stuff happy? For more data, buy our best-selling
Self-Help hit: Can Pronouns Matter - A Post-Cortical Vision
Of I And Thou, And "I'm" Not So Sure About "Thou", Buddy.

[TOP]

A Far More Modest Proposal

Another school shooting.
Far too little attention is given
to the danger of allowing people to have
hands. Without hands, it is hard to grasp
guns, pull triggers, punch, commit sexual abuse,
etc. Hands have been involved in ALL
the recent school shootings.

Yet in our competitive society with its corporate ethic
of GRAB GRAB GRAB, hands go uncontrolled, unlicenced,
are seldom confiscated even where used
in multiple crimes, and are readily available to anyone,
even small children! The United States
is particularly backwards in this respect.
In Sierra Leone, hands are frequently confiscated.
A thief forfeits a hand in Saudi Arabia.

Why do we give hands such a free hand?
On the other hand, say some, we have always had hands,
but we have not always had shootings
in our schools. True, but we also had guns —
and with far looser gun laws — in earlier decades
when there were no school shootings.
Yet we denounce guns with fervor,
while ignoring hands.

What we did NOT have in our schools
before these shootings were
"values clarification" courses teaching students to disregard
morals derived from church or family and create "their own"
(i.e., politically correct) values. We also didn't have
large numbers of students on psych drugs (e.g., Ritalin,
Prozac) and given psychological counseling in the schools.
In fact, we didn't realize that schools were supposed to be
clinics to produce well-adjusted, quiet, attentive
illiterates.

This SOUNDS relevant,
since all the kids who've shot up schools
were previously given counseling and
put on psychiatric drugs and then given a clean
bill of health. Then they killed people.
And that's a factor NOT present in the decades
before the killings began.

But that can't be significant.
After all, the drugs were given the kids
by the schools themselves,
who surely know what's best for their students.
And the shrinks are so sure of the safety of these drugs
that they've used medical privacy laws
to make it hard for journalists to discover
what, if any, drugs the murderers were on.

They're Mental Health Professionals.
Would they lie? If we can't trust our
Mental Health Professionals, who CAN we trust?
So that leaves us with guns, and, more to the point,
HANDS. If we take away guns, kids can still find knives.
But if we take away their hands, they can't even
give us the finger! I see no drawback, except, perhaps,
the added expense of having school nurses
place the daily capsules on the students' tongues.

[TOP]

PSYCHU (Gesundheit!)

The new school desk —
a bored child squirms.
MEDICATE!

American schools —
the worlds best public
medication.

"I see," he says
as if he could, then writes
a prescription.

DSM IV:
Whatever you are is a
syndrome. Insured?

The baby reaches
for the flame. Careful — don't be
authoritarian.

Boys with guns act out,
relieving stress, salvaging
their self-esteem.

Witness stand: Expert
testimony: Poor killer —
an abused child!

Muffled "I can't breathe!"
from the squirming child, but they
teach him...silence.

"He came to us too late."
"He failed to take his pills."
Expert excuses.

"Suicidal thoughts?
It CAN'T be the pills. We'll
raise the dosage."

Insisting he's fine,
he's drugged for Oppositional
Disorder.

Autumn — the more we
medicate, the more we roll
in federal funds.

"Shock won't damage
memory," says one who has
forgotten himself.

Downers to handle
the uppers...brain-juggling for
"chemical balance."

Poor paranoid!
Imagining shrinks want
to drug and shock him...

"Did he ever touch you
inappropriately?...look
HARDER...". Dad-abuse.

"Don't you think that's
significant...?" Toss the shrink
something juicy.

Miraculous! He's
cured just as his insurance
runs out!

Prozac — a relief
not to care what others feel...
DO others feel?

Outlaw psych drugs
and only outlaws will push
psych drugs...just like now.

Child withdraws from
Ritalin — suicide.
Connection? Prove it.

"Psychiatry" means
curing the soul. Soul? The shrink
will cure you of that.

The nurse comes to your
home to watch you medicate:
SWALLOW. It's the LAW.

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?" "Psych." "Psych who?"
"Gesundheit!"

"Psychu!" "Gesundheit! —
That's German for 'Health'." "Like
German for 'Solution'?"

The kids we drugged and
counseled now kill each other —
MORE counselors!

[TOP]

Run, You Sucker, Run!

(Video montage of healthy men, women and children
playing, smiling, riding in elevators, kissing, bathing
hard-to-identify body parts and diving off palmy cliffs
into blue lagoons backed by rainbowed waterfalls...)
NEW!!! FROM LILY-PONDS-MURCK!!!! EUSUCRYN!!!!!!
NO MORE HEADACHES, DEPRESSION, UGLY BALD SPOTS,
HOT FLASHES AND IRREGULARITY TO INTERFERE WITH
BEING THE BEST YOU THAT YOU CAN BE. WE CARE FOR
YOUR SYMPTOMS WHILE YOU LIVE THE CAREFREE LIFE
THAT YOU DESERVE — DOESN'T EVERYBODY?!!!
[maynotshowsignsofeffectivenessfor6monthsat
$10/dayin20%ofcaseswon'tworkatallinwhich
caseseeyourhmoappointedguyifyouarepregnantdonot
enteraroominwhichabrokentablethasbeenexposedto
theairwithinthepastweeknotrecommendedfordiseases
orspeciesforwhichitiscontraindicateddonottake
withalcoholfoodwaterorairasmallpercentageofusers
willdeveloplupuscerebralpalsyepilepsyorother
seizurelikesymptomsinwhichcaseseeyourhmoguy
oryourfuneraldirectorpromptlycausesdepression
anxietyand/orpsychopathiccompulsionstoeatyour
childrenorparentsinasmallpercentageofusers
inFDAtestingworkedalmostaswellasplacebosand
betterwithstatisticaljugglingwasapprovedby
FDAafter6weeksoftestingbylabsfinancedbyourcompany
whosemainstockholdersandvicepresidentsincludemost
ofthelastFDAapprovalboardnoonehasacluewhatitwill
dowhenusedyearafteryearasrecommendedhasnotbeen
testedonchildrenoldpeoplepregnantwomenwhocould
affordthelitigation?butcanbesoldtothemissupposed
tobeprescribedbydoctorswhoknowwhatthey'redoingand
whoknoweverythingaboutthedrugthatoursalespeople
givethemalongwithfreetripsconventionhotelrooms
footballticketsandmugsandsincetheworstsideeffects
probablywon'tshowupformonthsafterbeginningusenoone
willbeabletoprovewecausedthemsotheproductwillsoon
beapprovedforoverthecounteruseandjustasyoubuyprozac
tohandlethesideeffectsofnutrasweetyou'llbeabletobuy
ourNEXTdrugtohandlethesideeffectsofTHISdrugsorun
donotwalktoyournearestpharmacyRUN!EUSUCRYN!]
WE RETURN TO "MARY CAN'T COPE", THE HEART-RENDING
SEE-BS MENTAL-HEALTH-PLUG MOVIE OF THE WEAK!...
_____________________________________________________________
Translation of the central part of the above poem, for the lazy:

[May not show signs of effectiveness for 6 months at
$10/day. In 20% of cases won't work at all, in which
case, see your hmo-appointed guy. If you are pregnant, do not
enter a room in which a broken tablet has been exposed to
the air within the past week . Not recommended for diseases
or species for which it is contraindicated. Do not take
with alcohol, food, water, or air. A small percentage of users
will develop lupus, cerebral palsy, epilepsy or other
seizure-like symptoms, in which case, see your hmo guy
or your funeral director promptly. Causes depression,
anxiety and/or psychopathic compulsions to eat your
children or parents in a small percentage of users.
In FDA testing, worked almost as well as placebos and
better, with statistical juggling. Was approved by
FDA after 6 weeks of testing by labs financed by our company,
whose main stockholders and vice presidents include most
of the last FDA approval board. No one has a clue what it will
do when used year after year as recommended. Has not been
tested on children, old people, pregnant women —who could
afford the litigation? — but can be sold to them. Is supposed
to be prescribed by doctors who know what they're doing and
who know everything about the drug that our sales people
give them, along with free trips, convention hotel rooms,
football tickets and mugs, and since the worst side effects
probably won't show up for months after beginning use, no one
will be able to prove we caused them, so the product will soon
be approved for over-the-counter use, and just as you buy Prozac
to handle the side effects of Nutrasweet, you'll be able to buy
our NEXT drug to handle the side effects of THIS drug, so run,
do not walk, to your nearest pharmacy — RUN! EUSUCRYN!]

[TOP]

On Hearing Voices

1
He's a very private person.
When he's alone, he smiles to think
that no one can know his thoughts
or feel his feelings, then thinks
something outlandish just to enjoy
its privacy, but "You've thought that
before," says one of his voices, and
"Who cares what you think!" says another.
His voices know him better than he knows
himself. He can hide nothing from them,
except when he takes his medication:
Then the voices are silent,
but he knows they still know —
unless he ups his medication:
The voices vanish. Now
not even they can know...
what is it they cannot know?

2
Why is the madman dense with voices?
Because the world is so dangerous
that the voices have nowhere else to go,
no one else it is safe to be.
Take your medicine — make it
unsafe for the voices to be
even you.

3
Terrified of the world that may one day
give him what he deserves,
he will let no others be,
sees them as (that is, condemns them
to be) mysterious gestures
of a hidden, dimly malevolent presence.
They have no voices of their own.
He is filled with the voices
he will not let them have.
His drugs silence the voices,
obscure the presence. Shadowy figures
gesture and make noise,
he among them.

4
Some people hear voices.
Other people refuse to hear them
by calling them their own thoughts.
If a thought doesn't quite fit,
they trim it, tuck it in, complete it,
put a twist on it to make it their own.
This is what most people call sanity:
To be full of voices that are not allowed
to speak for themselves.

5
Governments hear voices
of dissent — it drives them mad!
They cut off speaker after speaker,
but the voices grow louder, ruder
as if there were no speakers,
only voices, as if governments,
like nuts, could hear voices.

6
The physical universe
is an old bad argument
mumbling on & on
in the head of the guy
who lost it long after
the winner's gone home,
not even the guy's argument —
he just blundered in
like a kind-hearted kid
who tries to make sense
of what the drunk on the corner
with the fixed glare mutters
to no one.

B'rer Rabbit thought the tarbaby
was talking to him,
tried to answer,
and got so stuck
that some claim to hear
it mumbling now
with B'rer Rabbit's voice.

7
The nut in the asylum who says he's God,
he IS God. They put him away
because he claimed to be hearing human voices.

8
Walking through the park,
I pass with embarrassment
a ragged man who talks loudly
to no one I can see.
Is that the way I sound
to passing angels
who can hear my thoughts?
And in what stillness dwells
the being who can hear
the incoherent babbling
of angels?

9
Munch's "The Scream" speaks:
The voices in my head goad me:
"Scream for us!" they chant; "You must
scream for us!" "Scream for yourselves,"
I reply. They scream and scream
in the echo chamber of my skull,
but their screams are swallowed up
by the thick wadding of air and color
that surround me. "Scream for us!"
they plead. I cover my ears,
but cannot silence them. I open my mouth,
but nothing comes out. I cannot move,
for there is no space to move into,
nor any to be in, so I am not.
No one is screaming this scream.
There is no scream.

10
Schizophenia, said the radio, means hearing
voices that aren't there — like book reviewers,
who keep hearing "fresh bold authoritative voices"
that no one else can hear.

11
He turned off the TV to find out
what he was looking at. He turned off
the radio to find out what he was
listening to. He found his head
aswarm with pictures and voices
for which he has not yet found
the OFF switch.

12
No one can hear them. He gives them
his own voice and actions: He is their amplifier.

13
Hearing voices no one else can hear is not so bad — but obeying them no matter what they say (throw away your money, drive your car into a parking lot and sit in it until the owner gets the police to drag you away when you won't talk to them or leave your car willingly...) — THAT'S almost as bad as marching to a different drummer!

A voice, to stick with us so and hold such authority, must have been visited upon us long ago and painfully, must threaten the return of incomprehensible agony if not obeyed, leaving little room for reason, ancient insanity emerging intact, like a shattered bowl assembled and preserved in lacquer.

Drugs do not diminish this voice vested with the authority of unconsciousness. They diminish the hearer's ability to hear, converting part of what we are yet able to be into a wall.

Whatever part of ourselves we use to wall off the enemy will soon learn to speak to us with the enemy's voice. In exchange for a day or year or lifetime of silence, we shrink. The voice, swells up with the force of our refusal to hear it. When next it breaks the silence, we KNOW it is God's.

14
Who hears voices, hears voices.
How it must enrage the speakers to be told
they are imaginary — "We'll show you
who's imaginary!" they fume, filling the world
with mechanical figures that even torturing
and chopping to bits cannot
make matter.

15
It's almost cozy,
this thick fog between me
and everything else, except
the TV whiteness is in here with me,
a moon reflecting my wavery vacancy,
no closer to me and no farther off
than the voices in my head,

and me such a precise thing now
because of all it can't touch,
precisely nothing at all
sitting very still like a rabbit
hunched on the verge of the trail
sitting still so long
it's become a rabbit-shaped niche
in concrete space.

Now something's buzzing about sympathetically,
trying to get in through the fog,
trying to be "you",
but all my "you" circuitry is bottlenecked
with heavy traffic: How-could-you's and
I'll-show-you's, the fog itself a maze
of circuitry shimmering with old force
that wants to use me to run amok,
smashing bodies and picture tubes —
I am paralyzed with resisting it.

Each time she brushes against it,
she gets a jolt of misdirected charge,
and disturbs this concentration
that uses me up holding everything still

and I can't even break through — because
I'm nothing in here, nullified
by all this electricity — to tell her
it isn't me, I'm hiding in here, I'm here, I'll be back —
this machine has to run down sometime,
it's a machine, it has to run
down and somewhere I still
I know she's not you,
you're you.

[TOP]

If We Outlaw Dreams, Only Outlaws Will Have Dreams

"Hero complex," "Delusions of grandeur"...
Delusions of Expert Testimony: Beware
the man who dreams himself a hero;
of such, warn shrinks, are the fanatics,
the crazed assassins of our day.

These students of the soul they think is not
fear any who dare disagree.
Those who dream their own dreams
are not well-adjusted, nor do they need our fear
to compel agreement with their dreams.

Those who imagine themselves heroes well enough,
are heroes. Greatness is one's dream
come true for all, all our dreams
come true in one.

Beware those who fear dreamers.
Beware those who cannot dream.

Madmen can only borrow the dreams of others,
overwhelmed by the agreement called
the world, its solidity ever demanding
"Just who do you think you are!"

The madman craves agreement,
dares not dream, not even for himself alone
for to dream one must
disagree

yet he clings to his last desperate
fragment of truth, that he is someone
special — for who is not a hero,
having once decided to be? —

so in the only world he recognizes (everyone's),
registers his specialness the only way he can:
bombs, bullets, slogans —
solid dreams prefabricated by others,
flung or fired into a mob of gaping
flammable faces, eyes wide with terror,
pain and guaranteed recognition.
No need to think: He gropes for
his quick fix,

the confirmation of his specialness
by a world that swallows dreams
and shits headlines.

[TOP]

Alcohol, drugs—people trying to open up
their heads and let the sunshine in,
with a can opener.

What happened to education?
It was killed by the Dewey Dewey fog.

The "science" of psychiatry
is mostly guesswork, having no
proven laws nor formulas. For example,
they are not certain if doubling
the number of psychiatrists would
double or quadruple the number of
mentally ill.

Psych-iatry: healing the spirit,
or is it heeling (as in "Heel!")

The race is ON!
Which medicine cures the most symptoms?
Stuperin blows away headaches, sore
throat, stuffiness, heartburn and
midlife crisis. But Utoprin does
all that PLUS serves you coffee just
the way you like it AND gives terrific
backrubs! So for total relief of almost
everything, take Utoprin, because
Utoprin is even better than YOU are!

Strapped in the asylum beds:
Safety belts for bumpy dreams?

"You should see a psychiatrist."
Yes, if you can see them coming,
you may be able to hide.

[TOP]

Dreams and Nightmares

Dorothy, homesick among gold, emerald
and crimson, clenching her wet eyes shut
in search of cozy black-and-white Kansas,
tries to turn with two heel-clicks
her ruby slippers gray. Whirlwinded
into phantasmagoria, one might well feel
assaulted by color and want to go back
to where one can wake from dreams and close
the storybooks at will, even if the only gem
(minus its rainbow ripples) is pearl.

Knocked out by a tornado's whim,
she's on her own. The colors and critters
are of her own making, though tinged
by the voices of loved ones anxious
at her bedside. The brightness is an absence
of gray agreement in her garish creation,
yet is nightmarish with the need to account
for her immobility and helplessness
back in Kansas. Caught in dreams,
she is free from doorknobs, bicycles
and clocks, but the feverish Kansas reality
(where she cannot wake up, though her pulse
is steady, says Doc) haunts her dreams
with danger.

At the end of the story, she prefers
gray familiarity and predictable objects
to a technicolor world where the bubbles
she blows may engulf her. While she dreams,
she can cause in only one direction: through
her will to wake up.

This is the paradox of drugs or any other
enforced creation: The dream is bright
because it is one's own, nightmarish
because the dreaming is enforced. The best
of both worlds would be to decide, wide
waking, not to agree.

[TOP]

DSM-IV

People who aren't sure
that they are anything at all
like to cram others into pigeonholes.
It pleases them to see others wince
at being called bitches, faggots, Jews, Niggers,
eggheads, whatever — to see
that they can impart that much life
to the dolls they toy with.

It is useful to to know that things
and people are not the labels we give them
(Hyperactive, Clinically Depressed,
Oppositionally Defiant, Homophobic,
Acrophobic, Bi-Polar, whatever),

for when we imagine otherwise,
we become unwilling to let go
of what we hold tightly to
for fear of becoming (willy nilly)
whatever else we may meet.

For example, Herr Doktor,
has it ever occurred to you
that if you loosened your hold on your head,
you might slip out of it (or it
clumsily drop you) and become
with a SPLAT!
a square of sidewalk?

[TOP]

We Don't Need the Help of Terrorists to Destroy America

Not foreign terrorists with bombs.
We have our own.

From an article in the Washington Post (Style Section, page 1,
printed Sept. 13, 2001 - two days after:

A Death Better Than Fate's

A couple stepped out in tandem, holding hands.
One man went headfirst, captured freeze-frame on film,
arms loosely at his side, one leg akimbo in a graceful passé.
A woman jumped while primly clutching her handbag,
as though she might have to hail a cab when she alighted.

Among the most heartbreaking images in a day of haunting imagery
were the dozen or more people who took stock
of where they were and what was happening to them and leapt.
Some were on fire. Most were not.

Why jump from the 90th floor of a burning building, to certain death?

Possibly because they could.

"In a way, it was a healthy response," says Ronald Maris,
a forensic suicide expert.... It is taking charge of a situation
rather than letting the situation take charge of you...".

[Then come examples of people who survived long enough
after jumping from a 1911 fire to explain
that they jumped so that their bodies would be identified,
not incinerated beyond recognition. Other experts (none
identified as psychiatrists, though psychiatrists,
having the highest suicide rate of any profession,
would be the experts, you'd think) quoted on suicide,

all agreeing that it's a matter of control, choosing
the less odious of two terrible alternatives and that,
to some jumpers, there's even a certain beauty in it.

THEN comes the final authoritative word
from a psychiatrist:]

Their decision may have been an effort to seek control
or to choose the better of two awful alternatives.
Most likely, says Calvin Frederick, former UCLA psychiatric professor
and an expert on traumatic stress, the choice was unconscious,
impulsive, a reflex more than a decision.

"There's smoke, there's a fear of horrific pain, it's imminent,"
Frederick says. "You can't breathe, and here is an escape.
Your response is very primitive. An animal response.
You become a human animal at that point, and an animal will flee."

Years ago, Frederick says, a colleague of his set up an experiment
where he subjected laboratory animals to excruciating pain.
They could go into another chamber to escape the pain,
but if they did, they would get their heads chopped off.
Other lab animals were allowed to observe this,
so they knew what would happen. They they, [sic.] too,
were placed in the pain chamber. They leaped out of it,
into the killing one.

"The urge to escape the pain," said Frederick, "overrode everything else."

2

Thank you, Washington Post, for showing us
the terrorist among us. Questions arise:

What sorts of animals were used? Rats? Monkeys? Dogs? Cats?

What sort of person would design and conduct such an experiment?

How can this theory explain the women who jumped
to avoid incineration so that their bodies would be identified —
human animals?

How desperately devoid of control were the couple who held hands
and jumped together?

Why is this psychiatrist so emphatic
that the action involved no dignity of choice,
being "animal, primitive"? Even the experiment he cites
shows the opposite: that even animals make rational choices,
for, as he says, these animals "...knew what would happen".
In fact, the only creatures lacking human dignity here
are the psychiatrist and his colleague, who, unlike Bin Laden
(purveyor, only, of death),
deny the dead even a final gesture of humanness.

How does Herr Doktor's view of human life and dignity
differ from the terrorists'? Were you a little bit terrified
when you read about the experiment?

And why did the writers of this article, who seemed to be
trying to let us see a human and humane side of a terrible incident
by turning those falling bodies into people holding an element
of control over their fates — why did they end
with this psychiatrist whose words try to destroy all that,
turning the jumpers into lab rats reflexively fleeing pain?

Or perhaps these writers saw
the weirdness of the psychiatrist's statement,
and let it conclude the article so that we could see it too.
I hope they had that intention.

More likely, the writers simply went blank on what they were writing.
Certainly the typist did: the only typo in the story comes
immediately after the description of the experiment
("They they" for "Then they"). I asked three friends
if they'd seen the story, described the first part in detail.
No, they said, they didn't see that. Then I paraphrased
the last part of the story, with the description of the experiment,
and suddenly all of them remembered having read the story
and realized they'd blanked the whole thing out
right when they got to that part of the story. One of them said,
"At that point, I just bounced from the page
and found myself thinking of something else."

Insanity is hard to confront. This is one reason why
a "War on Terrorism" will almost certainly become
a war on something else
easier to confront than terrorism.

America is largely in the hands of people like Calvin Frederick,
who, no doubt, worked at UCLA
when the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry
was "Jolly" West, the man who killed someone's pet elephant
with an overdose of LSD. We take medications
designed to suppress sets of symptoms mislabeled illnesses
by these same people. They run our schools, mistaking imagination
and dreaming and action for animal activity to be subdued
by drugs. They've been gnawing away at the notion of right and wrong
for decades and turning our schools, churches and courtrooms
into psychiatric clinics.

Like other weapons of mass destruction,
they won't be found in Iraq. And they are almost invisible
here - in plain view, their mad notions
passing for what everyone knows
must be true, because it's SCIENCE and because
nine out of ten experts agree. Soon, if America were a tower,
it might be sanity to jump off. Hand in hand.

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